Thursday, 28 April 2016

[This short article first appeared as part of the online launch of The Writers' Toolkit which remains available on Facebook and contains articles, tips, mini-tutorials and editorial comments on work that authors submitted for critique prior to the launch

The Danuta referred to below is Danuta Reah, co-author of The Writers' Toolkit.
Dyane is one of the authors who submitted work to the event]

When is a manuscript ready to send out?

Danuta is spot on in her answer to Dyane’s general writing question. There will always be things that could be changed. And there will always be readers who don't like the book. That's fiction. In the history of the world there is no universally liked work of fiction. You certainly shouldn't try to please everyone because you can't.

Agents tend to say 'Get it perfect' or (more realistically) 'as close to perfect as you can'. There's a lot in that. Some things you can do mechanically, like spelling, layout, proofreading for typos, quote marks in the right places etc. Building the story into a compelling read is what you do over a long apprenticeship.

All ‘overnight success’ stories happened after a lot of hard work (the occasional ghost-written celebrity memoire excepted).

You learn to find your writing voice. I had found several voices and was in discussion with a publisher, doing rewrites on one of my novels, when a completely different book suddenly took off – totally unexpectedly and from the back of a cupboard – and I was back into a different writing voice; one that I thought would never see the light of day. My first published novel was rewritten from scratch many times. I genuinely can’t remember how many. If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have had an easier time of it.

I’ve tried to write down what helped me to publication. All those ideas, people, techniques that I used along the way are summarised on my website. The Writers’ Toolkit is a part of this – a more detailed explanation of the specific techniques that not only helped me to learn to write but that I also use now.

Thursday, 21 April 2016

[This short article first appeared as part of the online launch of The Writers' Toolkit which remains available on Facebook and contains articles, tips, mini-tutorials and editorial comments on work that authors submitted for critique prior to the launch]

Milking the action and emotion: never summarise the dramatic moments

Dramatic moments can make your book stick in a reader’s mind. It’s worth getting the most out of them. The thing with dramatic moments is that they happen quickly and can be described in few words e.g.

• Jo teetered at the cliff edge for a couple of seconds before regaining his balance.• Maisie suddenly realised who it was and flung herself into his arms.• The car pulled out in front of him without any warning and Horace drove into the side of it.

But when writing a dramatic moment into your fiction, remember that for Jo, Maisie or Horace these are not split second events. Time will slow. Seconds will crawl by. They will experience a whole range of emotions and feelings – terror, shock, amazement, disbelief, relief. They will even be analysing the situation as it happens and might be aware of the faces of other people nearby (frozen in shock perhaps). This is true also of those who witness moments of high drama such as sudden car crashes. They too run the gamut of emotion as the events unfold. This happens because the brain works at lightning speed, way faster than physical reactions. If you’ve ever been driving and had someone pull out in front of you, giving you maybe a third of a second before the impact, you will know the reality of ‘thinking distance’ – an absolute awareness of what is happening whilst your body simply cannot react.

And if you can get right inside the head of the character to whom the dramatic event is happening, you will write some compelling prose.

You can employ techniques of language and structure e.g. fragments, short sentences, to give realism. You must take care not to overdo the internal analysis. You don’t want the reader suddenly to think, wait a minute, this guy’s been teetering on this cliff edge for half an hour!

If you have a viewpoint character in a bit of a sticky situation that is going to lead up to a big dramatic moment, stay with that character’s actions, feelings and emotions every step of the way almost second by second. But when you get to the real drama – the event that in reality will be over in seconds – get in even tighter. Go millisecond by millisecond with your character and make the reader experience the event with the character.

You will be surprised at how a single sentence such as ‘The car pulled out in front of him without any warning and Horace drove into the side of it’, can turn into several paragraphs or even pages of compelling prose as you take the reader through the event as though they are experiencing it themselves.

Thursday, 14 April 2016

[This short article first appeared as part of the online launch of The Writers' Toolkit which remains available on Facebook and contains articles, tips, mini-tutorials and editorial comments on work that authors submitted for critique prior to the launch]

The balance between intrigue and irritation

The trick of giving the readers enough information to intrigue them, without giving the impression you’re hiding anything (which irritates rather than intrigues) is to be tight behind the character’s eyes in a particular situation. As long as the character wouldn't explicitly be thinking about it or reflecting upon it, then you can get away without letting the reader know about it. To use an extreme example:

Your viewpoint character is a man standing at the top of a cliff. Someone else arrives. Your character greets the new person in a manner that shows they know each other e.g. ‘Hello, I wondered where you’d got to.’ Then the new arrival tries to push your character off the cliff. Your character clearly knows who this would-be assassin is, but in that situation the only thing in his mind will be the fight not to fall off the edge, the struggle to stay in balance, the frantic grabbing for a handhold. The reader might be desperate to know who it is, especially if this scene happens well into the novel, but it’s fine not to say, as long as you stay very closely with your character as they struggle not to fall.

Of course, the very second your character reaches safety or has the opportunity to reflect, then he will think about who it was who tried to kill him, and at this point you need to let the reader know. If you don’t want the reader to know, then cut to a new scene either before your character reaches safety or at the exact point.